Chipped Cup
*Belle † *Merida *Moe French *Regina Mills *Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold/Weaver † |usedby = Belle/Belle French † *Merida *Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold/Weaver † *Tilly |firstappearance = Skin Deep |latestappearance =The Guardian |latestmention = Flower Child |usedfor = Drinking tea Restoring memories Cutting ropes }} The Chipped Cup is an item featured on ABC's Once Upon a Time. It first appears in the twelfth episode of the first season. The Chipped Cup is based on Chip from the Disney film Beauty and the Beast. History }} }} After Belle loses her memories because of accidentally crossing the town border, Mr. Gold visits her in a hospital room with the chipped cup. Placing it in her hands, he asks Belle to look at it and concentrate, in the hopes that if she tries hard enough, some of her lost memories will come back. He mentions the cup is charmed with magic, which only causes her to take the cup away. Mr. Gold insists she try, but she repeatedly refuses. In the midst of the two pushing the cup back and forth into each other's hands, Belle, agitated and frightened, hurls it against the wall. With the cup shattered to pieces, she urges him one final time to leave, to which he does in despair. At some point, Mr. Gold returns to the hospital to collect the shards of the cup and keeps them in his shop. His close call with death at Hook's hands leads him to make a last confessional phone call to Belle. When Mr. Gold survives, she is incredibly relieved and begins to trust that he can help her recuperate from amnesia. Before that can happen, Regina intervenes to plant false memories in Belle so she takes on the persona of Lacey. Completely opposite of her old self, Lacey is drawn to the dark side of Mr. Gold and the two begin a relationship. In a ploy to destroy Storybrooke, Tamara, who entered town under the guise of Neal's fiancée, teams up with her partner, Greg, to gather intel on magic. As a side quest of sorts, she helps Greg capture Regina for interrogation about his missing father's whereabouts. Tamara pockets a trigger from Regina, which in turn, after sending it into their employees, The Home Office, the item is discovered to be the catalyst for annihilating all of Storybrooke's residents. Eventually, Greg and Tamara are forced to flee as David, Emma, Mary Margaret and Neal close in on the building to rescue Regina. In the midst of Tamara's escape, she knocks out Emma and severely injuries as well as sends Neal to his death by opening a portal, which he falls into. Later, David and Mary Margaret give condolences to Mr. Gold about Neal's death, yet also ask for his help in halting the trigger's effects. Unfortunately, the news of his son's passing breaks any resolve in him to assist them. As the end of Storybrooke nears, Mr. Gold is given an extra brewed batch of Mother Superior's memory potion by Leroy, which will work to restore a person's Enchanted Forest memories if the user drinks it from one of his or her own precious items. Leroy pushes him to have Lacey drink it so at least she won't die without knowing her true self. He ignores the advice until a troubling moment when Lacey attempts to clean up a drink spill using a shawl as a mopping rag. Horrified, he snatches back the shawl, which belonged to his son, and shouts at her about its importance and how she would not understand. Confused, Lacey apologizes, but the incident helps Mr. Gold to realize the one person he needs most right now is Belle. Reluctantly, he takes out the cup shards and restores the object to its original state. Lacey doesn't understand his fixation with the cup, though he says it's something from their past. Then, he pours the potion liquid into the cup and she drinks it in a toast. Seconds after ingesting the potion, Belle returns and reunites with Mr. Gold as she comforts him over the loss of Neal. Eventually, the trigger is stopped with the combined powers of Emma and Regina. However, Henry is kidnapped to Neverland by Greg and Tamara; leading Mr. Gold to join in on the journey there to rescue him in honor of Neal. While he believes the only way to save Henry from the villainous Peter Pan is to sacrifice his own life, Regina suggests that there must be a way to contain their nemesis. Mr. Gold has just the item for the job, except the weapon itself is sitting in his pawnshop in Storybrooke, so Regina barters with a mermaid, Ariel, to retrieve it. Ariel is sent off to Storybrooke with a request from Mr. Gold to give Belle a magically enchanted sand dollar. Once the item reaches Belle's hands, she activates it to project an image of Mr. Gold along with a specific message from him. He informs her that she can indeed find the necessary item to defeat Pan "with the strength of their love". The riddle puzzles Belle until she thinks of the one item that is symbolic of the wear and tear their love has been through, which is the chipped cup. Unsure what to do with the cup, she places it back in the cupboard on a saucer; triggering a spell to open a hidden compartment in the floor. Inside, Belle finds Pandora's Box. }} A little while later, Merida leaves Mr. Gold tied up, alone, so she can go get Emma to show her his progress, but the chipped cup is left sitting in front of Mr. Gold. He reaches for the cup and kisses it before whispering "I'm sorry, Belle" and smashes the cup so that he can use one of the pieces to cut through his the ropes binding his wrists. The cup is next seen in shards when Merida and Emma find that he's escaped and fled the area. When Belle falls under a self-induced sleeping curse, Mr. Gold makes it his mission to find a way to wake her up. This leads him to entering her dreams, having one hour to make her fall in love with him again. In Belle's dreams, she's working as a maid in Rumplestiltskin's castle again, and one scenario that occurs is she begins preparing tea for him. Due to her nervousness, she drops one of the cups; however, rather than the cup hitting the ground, Rumplestiltskin catches it and comments how it's "not even chipped." }} Years later, when another Dark Curse is going into effect, Rumplestiltskin hands the chipped cup over to Alice. Explaining that he's put "Mr. Gold" in a room inside of his mind, he tells Alice that the chipped cup is the key to trigger his memories and to get it to him to help him remember himself. He tells her it should release Mr. Gold, but if it doesn't then she knows what to do. Alice, holding onto the chipped cup, huddles together with Rumplestiltskin and her girlfriend, Robin, as the curse engulfs them. }} At some point later, Weaver spends time in his work office and begins gluing the broken pieces of the chipped cup back together. Rogers walks in and notices what he is doing, commenting that he never took Weaver for an antiques' kind of guy. He asks Weaver if he wants to grab lunch and work on the Candy Killer case. Weaver declines, deciding they both need a break, and remarks that his wife used to say wandering another path leads people to where they need to go, hence why he is focusing on fixing the cup. Entertaining the possibility that everything in his novel actually happened, Henry creates a map of characters and items and tries to match them to people and things in real life. When Tilly and Rogers come to talk to him about Eloise, he shows them the picture of the chipped cup from his novel and how it coincidentially looks identical to a cup that Weaver owns. }} Trivia |-|Production Notes= Production Notes *When creating the chipped cup, the prop department scoured the town for the right-looking retail teacups, and each took turns breaking one. When they got the perfect break, they cast the actual prop in hard-impact plastic with the break already built into it, and added the blue painted embellishment.Once Upon a Time - Behind the Magic, London, Titan Books, October 2013, p. 41 |-|Cultural References= Disney *There are other references to Chip throughout the show: **When marrying Mr. Gold, Belle says that "sometimes the best tea cup is chipped". **When Belle is talking to Rumplestiltskin after he returns with the magic gauntlet, there is a close-up of Rumplestiltskin's teacup.File:411CupOfTea.png **In Isaac's alternate reality, Rumplestiltskin drops a teacup and Belle picks it up to see that the rim is chipped. **In Belle's dream, she drops a teacup, but Rumplestiltskin catches it and says that it's not even chipped. The segment where Belle is holding the cup and the teapotFile:601ImSoSorry.png are a reference to Chip and his mother Mrs. Potts. **When Belle is staying aboard the Jolly Roger, a teapot and single tea cup are sitting on the table in "The Other Shoe"File:603BelleReading2.png and "Strange Case",File:604WhateverHappened.png File:604WouldBeMine.png another reference to Chip Mrs. Potts. |-|Set Notes= Set Dressing *The other cups on the tea trayFile:112ImSoSorry2.png are Royal Albert Val D'Or teacups, with added blue paint. |-|Goofs= Goofs *Despite the chipped cup being placed on the mantel during the close-up shot in Belle and Mr. Gold's house in the Edge of Realms,File:704ChippedCup.png the cup has disappeared in the following wide shot.File:704PlacingSpinningWheel.png |-|Other Notes= Other Notes *The chipped cup used during the filming of "Skin Deep" was taken from set by Robert Carlyle as a memento. It was later autographed by both Robert Carlyle and Emilie de Ravin and put up for a September 2012 charity auction for With Kids Glasgow, a charity organization focused on helping children in need. The cup that was auctioned off was used in all shots of the episode except for the scene between Mr. Gold and Regina at the sheriff's station, where a duplicate prop was used. The winning bid was 2,450.00 pounds. Appearances }} Note: "Archive" denotes archive footage. References }}de:Kaputte Tasse fr:Tasse ébréchée it:Tazzina Scheggiata